No hijackers on the passenger manifests
From 911myths
The FBI told us that the 9/11 flights were taken over by 19 hijackers, each group having a replacement pilot, who then aimed to fly their plane into a given target. But one common objection to this is that the hijackers didn't appear on the passenger manifests for those flights, and therefore weren't on the planes at all. Here's what David Ray Griffin has to say:
One immediately obvious explanation for this comes from the URL used by Dr Griffin, which tells us it's a "victims" list. Is it really surprising that suspected hijackers wouldn't be included? We'd say not, and a moment spent at the CNN site confirms this as true. Visit the main Memorial page, click "about this site", and on 11th July 2007 we read this text:
So "those identified by federal authorities as the hijackers are not included". Note also that the list came from press reports, not directly from the airlines. This is not an official manifest.
On making this point before we've been asked why? Why did CNN have to cobble together a list in this way, why didn’t they get the details direct from the airlines? Look at what one of the airlines says, though, and there’s an obvious answer. Here's a UAL press release:
And this is what American Airlines had to say:
It seems that both airlines were contacting the families of people on their flights, and not releasing names of passengers until the families gave permission. This might be quickly given for their own staff and passengers who were US citizens, for instance, but locating the family of alleged Flight 175 pilot Marwan al-Shehhi, for instance, wasn't going to be nearly as easy. Not least because the hijackers seemed to use each others details as contact numbers and addresses, meaning these couldn't be used to get in touch with relatives. And so the hijackers were always less likely to appear in the early lists.
None of this means the hijackers weren't included, however, and one newspaper did reproduce what they said was the manifest of Flight 11.
Text of that Boston Globe article here.
And here is that manifest, which does indeed show the hijackers:
The only issue we noticed here is the image refers to Abdulraham Alomari, rather than Abdulaziz. However we discovered an article showing this as a middle name, so perhaps that's where the confusion has arisen.
This was the only complete manifest published in the press, however journalist and author Terry McDermott reports that he obtained passenger lists from the FBI while researching a book, and they did contain the hijackers names. We obtained copies, and while the names are abbreviated, and 6 passenger names are curiously missing, all the hijackers appear to be included (see this page for more).
 Flight 11 1/3 |
 Flight 11 2/3 |
 Flight 11 3/3 |
 Flight 77 1/2 |
 Flight 77 2/2 |
 Flight 93 1/1 |
 Flight 175 1/1 |
Further, in the Moussaoui trial an exhibit in the form of a Flash applet provided the passenger names and seats for all four flights. The source file is 27 MB in size, but we've taken screen grabs of the relevant sections here:
 Flight 11 |
 Flight 77 |
 Flight 93 |
 Flight 175 |
The names and seating positions match with the earlier documentation, and once again the hijackers are included.
The one remaining substantive objection to the hijackers actually being on the planes comes from Thomas Olmsted, "an ex Naval line officer and a psychiatrist in private practice in New Orleans". The first part of his article explains.
This article has been frequently quoted as evidence that the named hijackers were not on Flight 77, however closer examination shows it does nothing of the kind. The problems start with Olmsted's apparent assumption that his "autopsy list" is somehow equivalent to a passenger manifest, a complete list of everyone onboard. The cover letter Olmsted receives tells us exactly what it is: "the names of 58 victims of AA Flight 77 that were identified here at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology" (AFIP). That is all.
And of course once you read that sentence, it's also obvious that Olmsted's claim that "no Arabs wound up on the morgue slab" is also entirely unsupported. All the document tells us is that these are the people who were identified by the AFIP. It doesn't discuss people who were not identified, or might have been identified elsewhere. By way of an example, 2-year-old Dana Falkenberg is also not included on Olmsted's list. Does this show she wasn’t on the plane? No, just that no identifiable remains were recovered. Therefore the list is demonstrably incomplete, even without the issue of the hijackers.
What’s more, accounts elsewhere explain that the hijackers bodies were recovered, and provide details on why they weren’t on the list.
The bodies were identified through DNA samples, and only the passengers relatives came forward to provide them (at least, initially). Obviously, this means the list of people identified by this process will contain the passengers only, no hijackers, and there's nothing mysterious about that at all.
Olmsted's other issues are based mainly around online victim lists. He tells us that "there were no Arabic sounding names on any of the flight manifests of the planes that “crashed” on that day", for instance: this is true of the CNN victims list, but as we've seen, that's not a manifest and CNN said the alleged hijackers were left off. It also ignores the real manifest published by the Boston Globe that did include their names.
We're also told that "three ADDITIONAL people not listed by American Airlines sneaked in". All Olmsted does here is show that the CNN victim list contained some errors, something we knew already. His own list does not conflict with any aspect of the official account, and isn't in any sense evidence that the alleged hijackers weren't on board Flight 77.
